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Title: May Ota Higa Interview
Narrator: May Ota Higa
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: December 17, 2004
Densho ID: denshovh-hmay-01-0002

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TI: Now, can you recall any other stories he had about early Seattle, growing up as a, as a young man?

MH: Well, he... no, I know him only as he struggled. But he was not only a businessman, but he was a businessman with a soul. And when he needed to make money, he opened a little stand, and he saw these homeless people down on Skid Row, and so he sold pea soup, he made pea soup, and the men would stand on the other side of this table, he would be on this side, and he would serve them a bowl of pea soup and a hunk of French bread that he got real fresh, and I think he charged something like five or ten cents a bowl. And that kept the homeless and the poor people from starving. And he didn't make much money, but he made enough to go for a while. But then as he, after he did that, then he noticed the Filipino men coming in without wives. They could not bring their wives in in those days, 19-, -- I'm going ahead now -- 19'... in the 1930s. That was lifted much later, wasn't it, to allow the Filipinos to come in.

TI: Yeah, it was probably after... 1924 was when they stopped -- actually, even earlier, probably like 19-, around 1910 or so, they stopped the laborers coming in. So from that point on, the Filipinos started coming in.

MH: Came without their wives, without women. And so then my dad saw these men come in, they didn't know where to stay and where to eat or anything, so he went to the, to the wharf, and as they came off the boats, he had rented a building, it's Midway Hotel, I don't know if it's still there. I think it's someplace around Seventh and King or Weller, it's a building there, he called it the Midway Hotel. Whether it's there now or not, I don't know. And he told these men as they got off the ship, "I will take you to a place where you can sleep." So he opened this hotel for these men, and the Filipinos stayed there. 'Course, he was very careful that we girls -- he had six girls and two boys -- that we don't go down there, because these were men who were looking for women. So, "You don't come to Papa's hotel." And then, after he... after he noticed that, later he noticed that the men didn't know what to eat, so accustomed to their own food, that he asked the men in the hotel, "Do any of you know how to cook Filipino food?" So a couple guys said, "Yes," so he opened a restaurant, and he opened the first Filipino restaurant there, I don't know, someplace in the International District.

TI: Well, it's interesting, your father was quite the entrepreneur.

MH: Yeah, he was, he was. And he made a killing very early, but I didn't get in on any of that prosperity that he had. But at one time he was considered a "hotel king," because he did make money.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.